Since the early days of the World Wide Web, managing state in the stateless world of Hyper Transform Text Protocol has been a challenge for web application developers. Recently, a variety of techniques for storing and retrieving state data have emerged. In modern programming languages, developers utilize these techniques to maintain and pass state across content requests.
Applications have several different ways to persist data between user requests. For selection of the correct persistence technique, a developer may need to answer programming criteria related questions such as the target audience for data consumption, the duration of the data persistence, and the size of the data set. Answering the criteria questions may help determine which method provides a suitable solution for persisting data between requests in a web application. A developer may choose to allocate application methods to provide data to all users, with unlimited duration, and any data size. In addition, the developer may also take advantage of newer methods of storing persistence data for improved access.
In conventional applications, the application data structure is typically used to handle persistence. However, use of application data structures limits a developer to mostly read only access. Connection strings are another one of the more common pieces of data stored in application variables. Modern web environments utilize application configuration files to facilitate data persistence. Configuration files are generally convenient and simpler ways to maintain persistence data.